Co-founder of Concentric Policies
Talk to me about American governance/political systems/democracy
My journey to EA:
2009: start arriving at utilitarian-adjacent ethics
Dec 2012: read Peter Singer’s Famine Affluence and Morality
Circa 2013/14: find my way to EA through googling about Singer and FAaM
2014-2019: in the orbit of EA. i.e. will talk to people about morality and utilitarian stuff but not very engaged in the community aside from attending uni club meeting every once and while.
2020: EAGxVirtual (I’m starting to move from the orbit closer to the actual community)
2022: Dive deep into the community. And now we arrive at the present day.
I was gonna write something similar, but I think this comment nailed it (kudos KarenS). So I’ll highlight two key arguments I endorse:
Framing mitigating the worst immediate effects and addressing upstream drivers as mutually exclusive is unhelpfully reductionist and, as other have pointed out, distracts from good arguments to invest in reacting to immediate effects over root causes.
Addressing upstream causes/systems change can have higher ROI than just addressing immediate effects in the long term and especially with issues that continue on in perpetuity without intervening on the root level. Case and point, Titotal’s example of slavery abolition. (Abolition of slavery has come up before as an interesting thought experiment to EA’s relation with root causes/systems change.